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Comment by albntomat0 | Hacker News Reader

As an investor, how am I supposed to know about various pieces of malfeasance by a company? Is it in their quarterly earnings announcements? Are they required to give me tours of their factories to whatever extent I feel?

I agree with your concern and aims, but there really isn't a window between when normal investors find out, and when the general public does. The board, executives, etc. are a different story.

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I think if you have enough influence to vote in policies the company performs, you should have some responsibility if it can be proven you're benefiting from illegal behavior from the company. Potentially in the form of having those returns taken back from you, because they're effectively stolen from society, in the same way that I shouldn't get to keep a stolen TV because someone I loaned money to regularly decided to pay me back via this cool new TV that I didn't inquire the source of.

All corporate structures that I’m aware of give voting rights to all shareholders, in proportion to the number of shares they have. Some companies like Google and Meta give more votes to different types of shares.

With the popularity of ETFs and mutual funds, any American with a retirement fund has voting rights in the 500, and probably more public companies.

The proper way to do things is properly penalizing the company sufficiently to affect the share price.

> With the popularity of ETFs and mutual funds, any American with a retirement fund has voting rights in the 500, and probably more public companies.

You do not receive voting rights when you hold index funds, ETF or otherwise. You only get to cast your own votes if you are an individual shareholder. Your index fund votes get voted by the fund runner.

That's why I said voting rights. If the if index fund managers find themselves on the hook for stocks they used to hold they'll take a much bigger interest in the CEO and Boards shenanigans.

Ahh, fair point.

Still, I'm skeptical that most shareholders have the ability to affect whether or not a company decides to commit criminal actions.

I agree, particularly in the case of companies where institutions own a majority of the shares (which is more than you’d expect, TWTR had something like 70-80% institutional ownership before going private)

as an investor, it is your responsibility to be informed as to what people are doing with your money. the entire purpose of liability limitations is to make it so people don't need to do that because all they have risked is money.

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